


Let Me Count The Ways

by ScatteredWords



Category: Carmilla (Web Series), Carmilla - All Media Types, Carmilla - J. Sheridan Le Fanu
Genre: F/F, Meta, Yes to all of the above, are they real in any physical sense or archetypal character concepts?, some hints at attempted nonconsensual vampire turning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-07
Updated: 2018-02-07
Packaged: 2019-03-15 02:44:58
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,358
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13603902
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ScatteredWords/pseuds/ScatteredWords
Summary: Sometimes I'm allowed to love you. And sometimes I'm not.(Musings on the nature of Laura and Carmilla from book to web series. What changes, what stays the same, and what they've been trying to do all along.)





	Let Me Count The Ways

**Author's Note:**

> There really is no explanation for this except that Carmilla is my favorite book and it got to be that way through a LOT of reading between the lines. I probably read into it some things the author didn't intend. And frankly, I don't care, but I do think about that a lot.

Somemetimes I’m allowed to love you. And sometimes I’m not.

When I was born to this world, flowing in graceful script from the nib of a fountain pen and then stamped bold in the heat and marching letters of a printing-press, you were the first thing I knew. You were a child and I watched you from the floor beside your bed. Blonde and tiny and the perfect picture of a little girl from a lithograph. Portrait of a cherub, early 19th century.

Sometimes I think, 1806. Other times, 1800. The dates of our first life were as nebulous as our faces and the dancing game we played with each other.

I faded through the wall when you sat up and cried for father and gouvernantes. And I thought, that was interesting.

You were the first good thing about me.

I loved you years and pages later, looking out of a carriage tipped on its side at your solemn, inquisitive face. Blue eyes. Golden hair. A doll girl, an ingénue, made by a man to be broken and corrupted.

Even then, you refused to be shattered for his convenience.

In any other book, you might have been a fainting spell and a scream in the night. In our story, you asked me questions in your strange trilingual creole, English, French, and German mingling together to form a single coherent thread. Asking, always asking; you stared at me with those big eyes in the flickering yellow candlelight, perched on your bed, and asked where I came from. What was my name? And my family? My schooling? My station? You were the eternal question, and that’s how I knew it was not my story, for all the cover bore my name, but yours.

I lay back on your bed, the feather mattress giving way slightly beneath me, your hands gentle on my head as you piled my hair into more intricate styles. “I have been in love with no-one and never shall, unless it should be with you,” I said. Some people interpret those words as a purr when they inhabit us. I said it like a prayer.

Our god may not have thought it true, but it is. Quite literally. I never lived before you; I never loved before you. I can never love anyone but you.

That time, I was not allowed to love truly.

I played the monster and was duly destroyed for it by the white knights on their chargers. The first good thing about me was the only good thing, and nothing evil can hold onto good. You burned me, like a torch too bright and hot for my hand. In any other story, the prince who slew me would win your heart just as he won the day.

In our story, our little and strange book, you remained alone. You told the tale of how I haunted you all my days and then took your leave to heaven or hell. The author was never good enough to mention which. Were you innocent victim or secretly complicit in your own descent? Learned men would bicker over it for a century and more, in their ivory towers standing so straight and unassailable against the sky.

I kept their words as I waited silently between the pages at the back of the shelf. Girls, learned and otherwise, held us close to their hearts and wept for something sweet that the men in the pulpits and the medical journals and the parlor told them was rotten. I kept their words and wished I could touch you without destruction. But it wasn’t that kind of story.

We stayed there, separate but together, forgotten for years. From time to time, someone would pick us up and dust us off. We were set up like automata in a parlor, our clothing changed but our movements locked in place with chains of gears and springs. Women picked us up and put us on like masks; they went onto film sets with our names set atop their brows like invisible crowns. Some of them understood. Some didn’t.

Sometimes I was a footnote to another story, the truth of my “human pets” hidden away behind the shadows of greater vampires. Sometimes I loved a man and used you to get to him, or as a distraction from him. I’ve been Dracula’s wife more than once. I took him out for drinks afterwards and we laughed over jukebox guitars about me and you and him and that bright-burning English lawyer. Two fictional constructs walk into a dive bar…I’ve definitely lived the punchline of that joke before.

Once, you were a blithering ninny and I a seductress wearing false eyelashes big enough to see from outer space. I barely got through that one, calling you a different name instead of the one I’ve whispered through the years like a benediction. But in the end, the story was the same.

I loved you. I hurt you. You lost me.

You might have loved me, one wise lady said, if I had asked for your hand in immortality instead of taking. I paused, my fingers hovering over the keyboard. We get surprisingly good wi-fi at the back of the shelf, once wi-fi existed in the world. Ask? I don’t know how to ask. I’m not allowed to know how; it’s not the point of the story. This is consumption, corruption. I love you like a wildfire loves a forest. That’s the only way. 

Isn’t it?

Ask. _Ask._ The concept turns over and over in my mind as I love and hurt and take and destroy a dozen times more. I think, at last, that I would like to ask you. I think that nobody ever asked me if I want to ask you. I get angry and maybe they sense that, because our story turns darker and more brutal.

Sometimes you aren’t even in the story and I think I might die before it even starts. I’m an empress in a sumptuous red dress on a throne made of pixels. I’m betrayed by a knight and vow to steal the hearts of women in revenge, writhing on them in a cheap gold lamé bikini. The rage intensifies. I live as half of myself and get through those tellings as quickly as possible.

How many times can you live a doomed love before you fall to pieces? How many ragged scraps of yourself can be torn away before the whole thing collapses into dust? How many times can we do this before we’re nothing more than outdated whispers on the wind?

And then.

I have a history, suddenly. I’ve never had one before. You asked and I was enigmatic but there was never anything to tell. Just the skeleton of an epilogue, filled in by your stalwart defenders at the last second.

Now- pain. It _hurts_. “Elle” means something, “Mother” means something, “Silas” means something beyond a dim awareness of our god’s other children. At first I think Elle means I’ve lost you, that this is to be another brief eternity lived without you.

And then.

“Hey.”

“Hey.”

“Who the hell are you?”

“Carmilla. I’m your new roommate, sweetheart.”

Everything in me that’s lived on the edge of a knife for so long, caught forever in the moment before we touch, falls into the abyss at last.

After we kiss, after we save the world, you draw away from me. There are supposed to be tears in your eyes, but I see in that glittering more than just a week or so apart. Over one hundred and forty years hide behind the nineteen you officially own to in this version, and it’s almost like a miracle. Almost like you’ve been waiting for this as long as I have.

I can’t say “we did it.” It’s not in the script, and the actress dressed up in me isn’t saying it. So I think it instead, and hear a question you’ve never asked me before burst out of you.

“So you’re a giant black cat, huh?”

So many times I’m not allowed to love you. And one time, I am.


End file.
